Apple in perspective: obligatory iPad post

While all my geek friends are in a frenzy over the announcement of the new Apple iPad (based on a Star Trek PADD, looks like a Kindle, acts like an iPhone, priced like a Win/Linux laptop, and – best of all – produces #iTampon as a trending term on twitter within minutes of its announcement), I thought I might just remind my rather over-excited alumni of a few details they tend to conveniently forget when they start to make radical predictions about the mass adoption of Apple technology.

1. The iPhone is popular but it’s not the most common phone on the market.

2. Apple computers are not dominant in the market either.

Indeed, Apple represented just 7.5% of total PC sales in the US in Q4 last year. That, by the way, is a drop in sales when compared with the same quarter in the previous year. For what it’s worth, Hewlett Packard and Dell were 52.6% of the market.

3. Battery life on the iPhone is rubbish

There are countless sites online which inform you how to extend your iPhone battery to last above a day – mainly by not using too many of those power-hungry applications, and keeping the screen rather dark. And they reckon the iPad battery will last 10 hours? Good luck. I have a feeling there’ll be a lot of users walking around straining their eyes on a darkened screen in order to conserve battery life.

4. People still prefer keyboards.

The iPad might have lots of functions and a touchscreen interface, but for the kind of functions where people want to communicate quickly and extensively, they’ll want a keyboard. Apparently there is a keyboard you can dock to the iPad, but … <cough, cough>… isn’t that just a netbook?

5. Apple products are for geeks. Yes, it’s true.

They like to think they are for everyday people, and they are certainly designed for ease of use, but for the most part the price point of Apple technology has put it out of the reach of most consumers. So it becomes a product that geeks save for and spend money on basically as a fashion device and as ‘proof’ of their value of quality design and hardware over cheaper Linux or Windows alternatives. Even the new iPad’s price at US$499 (£308, A$557) is still about £55 more than the average netbook price. So although it’s a lot closer to being competitively priced, it’s still more expensive than its competitors. And that’s still going to matter to people who are struggling financially.

Don’t get me wrong: I have a great appreciation for Apple products. I used to be a Mac user. I had several Macs over the years and was an enormous fan of the quality of the hardware. I just know that when it comes down to it, it’s still a luxury item. Only the iPod ever made it to mass acceptance and that was primarily because MP3 players were uniformly dreadful. And even then, an iPod is still between two and ten times more expensive than its rivals.

So before you start lauding the iPad as the next big thing in computing, take a step back and work out what people actually want to do with their technology – what tasks and what outcomes in communication are they seeking? What interfaces are most efficient in achieving those outcomes? What pricepoint is acceptable? And finally, where exactly is the market? The iPhone has been a dismal failure in China, and as the BRIC countries are likely to be the greatest influencers in the future of technology development, I think we should be looking to see what they are buying before we start talking about any technology changing the world.

All I’m suggesting is that the current hype is merely that: hype. Get some perspective and remember that the iPad is just a big Newton.

Hmmm. All true, but I’m not sure it’s really the point. (Just to be clear, before I start, I’m not an Apple fanboy: I’ve never owned a Mac, I’ve had a couple of regular iPods, and I finally switched to the iPhone but only when the 3GS came out.)

Apple has, for a long time now, not been about mass market products. It has been about high-end, high-margin products. Sure, it’s not the most widely deployed phone OS. But, by many industry surveys, they have far and away the most profitable phone business. Ditto with laptops: Dell & HP are in the mass-manufacturing price-competitive business, Apple wants to sell products with high margins. And it’s doing very well (for itself and it’s shareholders) with this strategy.

Similarly, there’s much rumour that Apple will get out of the HD-based iPod business – sales are dropping, and margins are now lower because of all the competing products in the space. Part of Apple’s genius over the last few years, along with great product and UX design, has been to have a truly TINY product range (less than 10 products most of the time, if you ignore accessories and trivial variants), and be able to build and market them really well. Compare with the 100s-1000s of devices that an HP/Dell/Nokia has chosen to pursue, and the inevtiable business issues this brings.

Yes, iPhone battery life is low compared to other phones, but only because users do so much more with it. If I put mine in “airplane mode” and only use it to play music, its life is better than an iPod. If I _only_ do phone-type things (calls & texts) its battery life, while unexceptional, is fine. And in any case, its not actually a real-world problem for me (and many others) – by day it sits in the docking station by me PC being recharged constantly.

Nick Carr (http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/the_ipads_lofty.php) gets it right: the key point about this announcement is that it is a client device that reflects that most compute-activities now happen in the cloud, and that the era of the PC is over. Whether the tablet as Apple conceive it is the future or not will be viewed as a lesser issue when we have the benefit of hindsight.

Joanne, I agree with your views. Even though I am an avid iApple convert, it is important to put all this into perspective.

I have an article from the FT today about Apples profit announcement yesterday and that article pointed out that even though Apple may claim leadership in the smartphone category (clearly not as you have shown) the overall all mobile market in 2009 was a wopping 1.1billions new phones shipped globally. Apple claim approx 20mil iphones, so that is less than 0.2%! Even in the UK in 2009, iPhones are < 5% of UK mobile handset market size.

Even though Nokia are being killed in the smartphone category and their revenues declining, in 2008 they posted a 50bil euro revenue…..on selling handsets globally.

So for a UK business to invest in developing an iPhone app to allow customers to buy from them from their mobiles…..they are missing 95% of potential customers by ignoring all the other potential MOBILE channels to reach their customers: twitter, sms, facebook, email, mobile web, Instant Messenger, MMS, Camera, IVR, QRCodes, MsTags, soon RFID/NFC etc. They should be considering a consistent multichannel approach to reach their customers…then they should outsource the technology/solution to achieve that to a company that focuses on delivering that mobile strategy so they don't have to worry about the technical challenges of supporting all those channels.

Don't get me wrong, I like Apple kit…I just don't think businesses should ignore other channels/devices/technology just because a minority of consumers see it as sexy.

Joanne, a question. The data behind your pie chart: what definition does that rely on to separate between Symbian devices that are smartphones and the vast majority that are not?

My suspicion (I could be wrong, but I need convincing) is that your chart includes all Symbian sales, in which case a) it’s not a smartphone chart and b) there are other mid-band (“feature phone” as they’re called in the US) OSs that need to be included in the chart i.e. it’s neither one thing nor the other and the data needs more careful review.

I’ve been on the brink of getting a Kindle for some time, but decided to hang off until the iTampon came out. After reading all the less-than-complimentary commentary here and at mashable.com, I now have reservations about going with Apple, and this is despite being a longstanding irrationally loyal Mac user snob. Having said this … I shall wait in the wings a while longer and wait for the dust to settle 😉

Technically your FT article is correct in terms of *profit margin*. Apple is generating the highest profit margin in the sector, but that’s based on raking in the bucks for fewer sales – so it’s a bit lies, damned lies and statistics. It’s a hell of a lot easier to claim higher profit margins when you have fewer sales to begin with. Your own stats on volume of sales is more useful though, because that indicates *mass adoption* and is more of an indicator of game-changing consumer behaviour.

I agree with all of this, although the iPhone does do a good job of being a sexy looking device, and some people just want sexy looking hardware. I dont agree with them, but I can appreciate their point of view.

I really commented to respond to this statement, “the key point about this announcement is that it is a client device that reflects that most compute-activities now happen in the cloud, and that the era of the PC is over.”

I’ve seen a lot of stuff about the “cloud” lately, and being a programmer and server engineer for a long time, it’s starting to annoy me. The “cloud” is nothing new, it’s been around for a long time, and it’s always operated in a niche. And it will stay there, the limitations to it are massive, the restrictions a killing blow.

Even with a 100Mbit net connection you are always going to have a latency problem with remote solutions, and the net is inherently an unreliable medium(Compaired to a local hard disc), there are, and always will be, errors and problems with accessing data over the web. There is no such thing as a 100% up web service, it has never and will never exist.

And, cloud computing accounts for a tiny tiny percentage of actual computing, it is by no means dominant. Home pc’s as a whole have vastly more computing power than web servers, by a factor of 10. Just because you use gMail and google docs you think the cloud is everywhere. Google docs has 3.4mil users at last count(And I bet half of them dont use it), MSOffice alone is on over 80% of windows pcs, the numbers aren’t even in the same league.

Sorry to hijack the topic, I had to vent 😛

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